


feel like a person for a moment of my life

by nosecoffee



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: All Blackwing Subjects Are Androids, Androids, Angst, Blackwing Made Androids, Body Dysphoria, Canon Compliant, Description Heavy, Dialogue Sparse, Dysphoria, EX Machina AU, F/M, Fluff, Found Family, Some Fluff, Sort Of, Torture, Violence, ambiguous ending, can be read as shippy, light fluff, self discovery, vague self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 00:52:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14225544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nosecoffee/pseuds/nosecoffee
Summary: "Hello." Says Svlad, and there's something wrong with his voice.A part of his shirt falls away when Svlad turns to look at Colonel Riggins and Bart sees the glint of metal, the dots of grating, finally registers the odd noise as the whir or wiring and gears.Bart realises what's so wrong with Svlad. "He's an android." Bart says, slowly.(In which Blackwing created androids, but didn't realise that the androids could be programmed to want revenge.)





	feel like a person for a moment of my life

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "To Be Alone" by Hozier
> 
> The first three sections of this were sitting in my notes for a while before I actually got around to writing it, and I'm actually so happy with how it turned out. Please be aware of light self harm and the mentions of torture and manipulation in this. I don't want to make anyone upset.
> 
> In any case, I hope you enjoy.

"I used to be smaller..." she says, admitting to him what she doesn't like to admit to herself. But it doesn't sound true. It is, and it should sound right, but it feels wrong on her tongue. Everything does. The doughnuts she stole don't taste like a thing.

"When you were a child?" Panto suggests. And that should be right, that should be it. It makes sense. But it's not true.

"No." Bart replies, slowly, and finally puts the doughnuts down, giving up on pretending she can taste them. "I was smaller. The first time. At the beginning."

*

She opens her eyes and all the people around her lean closer, looking stunned, as if they never believed she could possibly be. The ceiling is white and unblemished, and a bright light shines right in her eyes.

They peer at her, curiously. It must be curiousness. What else would it be? That must be it. A man ushers them all back from her, and stares down at her, with hopefulness (what must be hopefulness, _yes_ , that _must_ be hopefulness) in his eyes and all across his features.

"Who are you?" He asks her.

"I am Bart." She replies. Her voice sounds wrong. She feels wrong. Everything about this is wrong. She feels too small and incomplete. She feels so wrong. "Where am I?"

"You're home," says the man, proudly. "This is your home, now."

*

He spins lies, the man, he tells her of a life before. A life she could not have possibly lived. A life she did not live.

She never did live.

Bart feels uncomfortable in her own skin, so she eats up his lies about a horrible car crash, and how when they found her she was barely alive. That the surgery was invasive but it was the only way to save her. She believes them. She lets them become vivid memories.

She has no reason to think he would lie to her.

The story explains the itching. He tells her not to scratch her stitches. She does not realise that the itching of stitches should fade, after a while. It does for everyone else. She does not realise it cannot be stitches making her itch.

It's just her skin.

*

They tell her she is special. They tell her she has a very special purpose. They tell her she's going to be an assassin. They're going to teach her how.

And they do try. She feels off in their lessons. Distracted. She does not take things in.

But each day she wakes up with a better understanding about what they're saying.

And that feels...off.

She guesses she should have suspected there was something shady going on from the start. But she doesn't. She tangles herself in the lies until she's wrapped tight enough in them that she won't get cold.

*

Then comes the day they bring in a boy, a boy with the same shade of red hair as her. He is pale, and has luminous blue eyes, so much more interesting than her brown ones. Bart wants to feel jealous. Instead she only feels neutral. She only feels indifferent.

"This is Svlad," says the man she has come to know as Colonel Riggins. Svlad looks up at the mention of his name. There's something jerky about his movements. There's something odd about his stare. "Say hello to Bart, Svlad."

Another jerky head movement, another hollow stare, an uncharacteristic smile. "Hello." Says Svlad, and there's something wrong with his voice.

Not alien. Familiar. That's why it's wrong. Bart has become used to the wrongness of her voice, and hearing it from Svlad - strange, familiar, _odd_ Svlad - now makes her skin crawl and itch furiously.

A part of his shirt falls away when Svlad turns to look at Colonel Riggins and Bart sees the glint of metal, the dots of grating, finally registers the odd noise as the whir or wiring and gears.

Bart realises what's so wrong with Svlad. "He's an android." Bart says, slowly.

Svlad frowns, as if his game has been spoiled. "She guessed it."

"Bart is a very good guesser." Colonel Riggins soothes the android boy, stooping down on creaking joints to kneel beside his chair. "She's supposed to be. One day, she's going to help us keep you safe, she's going to get rid of people who would hurt you."

Bart tries to feel the beat of her own heart in her chest, because surely she has one of those. She registers a thumping and sighs in relief. She's just being paranoid.

"Do you like me, Bart?" Svlad asks her.

Bart wonders if she ever had a brother, a twin, because she has the faintest recollection of him, Svlad, or someone who looks just like him, smiling at her, wider than now, eyes sparkling with something more human. It's gone as quickly as it came.

Bart can only nod. Svlad is satisfied with this answer.

*

Bart is not.

*

From then on, whenever they introduce her to someone, each child with a more ambitious purpose than the last, she looks for the telltale signs of blank eyes, jerky movements, flat tones of voice.

Bart catches each and every one of them in the act. She doesn't know why they bother introducing her to them if she can tell when they're hyper realistic androids.

But they keep coming through her doors, sitting on the chair that stands in the corner.

A girl who can make you think she's turned into an object or another person, a boy who can create things with his mind, Svlad.

He's a common visitor, becoming more and more excitable with each visit. They're training him to be something of a detective, the same way they're training her to be something of an assassin. She's going to be his protector, one day, that's what he says. He's not programmed with the capabilities to fight attackers off, so it will help to have a talented human weapon on his side.

Bart believes she's human less and less with each passing day.

*

The day she wakes up and feels too big in her own body is the day she knows.

Bart doesn't eat the food they leave on the chair in the corner - it never tastes like anything, so why should she bother? - she just takes the butter knife and stalks over to the sink, giving her reflection a good once over. She's taller than before, her hair a little longer, her eyes a little lighter.

She wonders if they thought she wouldn't notice.

Bart rolls up the sleeve of her uniform jumpsuit and presses the sharp part of the blade to the inside of her wrist. She has to know. She has to be sure she's right.

She draws the blade through the skin.

And feels nothing. Shouldn't she be writhing in pain? Shouldn't blood be welling up through the slash? Instead, she feels nothing.

Bart looks down at the torn flesh and sees something glow in the darkness between the two flaps of skin. She peels it back, slowly, still expecting pain that she realises she's never felt.

There it is.

Wiring, metal, glass.

She's always known, she supposes, but the fact that they tried to convince her she was human?

That hurts more than any butter knife to the wrist.

*

Colonel Riggins is understandably upset that Bart uncovered the truth, but Bart feels more entitled to the emotions she cannot feel, right now.

They've given her a new patch of skin on her wrist, plugged a cord into the port behind her ear, and look at whatever shows up on the computer the other end of the cord is attached to. They frown at it. They're not happy. Neither is Bart. She can't remember ever feeling happy.

"You lied." She says to Colonel Riggins, once she's all patched up and safely back in her room. They put her in a straitjacket to stop her from hurting herself, again. It didn't hurt. She just damaged their property. That's what she is, isn't she? That's what they think of her? "You lied to me."

He hangs his head. He's not really sorry. He's just upset that she caught him out.

Bart wants to feel angry, wants to use her training to raze him to the ground for what he has made of her.

She just feels neutral. Indifferent. Blank.

She hates it.

"Leave me alone."

*

Something goes wrong.

A new experiment, a group of four boys, four hyper realistic androids, moved into adult bodies, just like the rest of them, something’s off in their wiring and they go on a rampage.

The damage to the facility is grand. Bart watches the fire burn with something like satisfaction. She relishes the way it crumbles to ash, her prison and her asylum for so many years. She watches the children, placed into bodies they don't quite fit, yet, running from this place, running away to go and live a strange life until these people ultimately catch up with them, again.

Bart is hit by a falling support beam.

Something goes wrong in her wiring.

She's all wrong.

*

She wakes up far away from the ruins of the facility, some of her hair singed, her memory damaged, her speech damaged, her vocabulary damaged.

Everything's damaged.

Bart runs further away than before, and kills the first man who pulls up beside her on the dirt road, before stealing his car.

*

It becomes something of a routine, driving for hours on end, in silence, trying to piece together her memory and her history, trying to understand why her urge is to kill, _always_ to kill.

Shouldn't there be an off switch, a time out?

Bart keeps driving.

She knows now why food never tasted like anything to her.

*

She sleeps in the backseat of the car she stole, and presses a hand to her chest, over the place where if she was human she’d have a heart. Something thumps rhythmically beneath her palm, and Bart, ever curious, digs her nails into the skin until she rips it away and looks beneath. The next day she sews the rip up, messily, with red thread and a needle from a convenience store hardware aisle, and splashes water on her face to simulate the tears she so badly wants to cry.

She so badly wants to feel the anguish they never programmed her to feel.

*

And it all changes when something clicks in her brain, a memory or a mission she does not know.

All she knows is she has to find Dirk Gently. It's important. So many answers will be provided if she does this, of she drives on and finds the man who sports that name.

Bart tightens her fingers around the steering wheel and takes a sharp left turn.

She's going to find Dirk Gently and have a new life. A _whole_ life.

*

Ken is not Dirk Gently, even if she so wants him to be.

Ken also accidentally presses some kind of pause button for her because she looks at him, collapsed on the ground, and while the words, "You're not Dirk Gently," come out of her mouth, some part of her sings that as long as Ken is with her everything will soon be clear.

It’s not a real pause button; Bart’s not even sure if she has one of those.

So, of course, he comes along with her, for the ride, even if she has to duct tape his hands together.

*

She shoots.

The strange protective field that surrounds her entire body protects her when the bullet flies out of the barrel of the gun.

Ken jumps. He looks so frightened. He hasn't got it, yet.

If it wasn't so inconvenient to find new skin grafts every time one ripped, she'd pull some back and show him what she really is, but it's not that simple. She supposes Colonel Riggins never meant for it to be that simple.

"I'm an indestructible hyper realistic android assassin." She says to him, and climbs into the car, dropping the gun in the backseat. "An' you should get in the car."

~

Bart is not particularly worried when she comes to and finds she's trussed up in a field. Ken is screaming for help, behind her, so that's less than ideal, but Bart knows either way she'll make it out of here.

And maybe Ken will die and the weird feeling that always makes the mesh thing in the place of her heart beat faster will die with him, but Bart's lived through so much already. Why should she care if he's another casualty to her existence? Why should she care about him at all?

He's panicking on the other side of the pyre, but Bart just feels neutral. Indifferent.

(There's something wrong, though. Not familiar wrong, alien wrong. It's in the corner of her mind, like peripheral vision, teasing her with its presence. She doesn't know what it is. She doesn't know how she would feel if they had programmed her to have emotions beyond confusion and satisfaction.)

~

Somewhere between the day she kills the biker cult and the day the ambulance breaks down, Ken finds a laptop, and a cord that fits the port behind her ear.

She asks him, as politely as she can, to do something for her, and Ken doesn’t need persuading. There’s no gun or machete involved, this time. He types fast and Bart feels dizzy ( _dizzy!_ ).

At her request, sitting in the back of the ambulance, Ken programs emotions into her, as she pulls the red thread from the rip in her chest and sews it more carefully with proper medical stitching.

The emotions come one at a time. Happiness. Anger. Misery.

He programs her skin grafts and the wiring beneath them to mimic the feeling of nerves, and Bart feels things properly. She runs her hands over the fabric of the blanket over her lap, her hair, the floor of the ambulance. His cheek, which is half-rough with stubble.

Ken smiles, asks what she wants next. Bart hardly needs to think about it. He gives her the knowledge of what food tastes like. Sweet and sour and spicy and salty. She practically tastes them on her artificial tongue.

Bart feels the most human she ever has.

She might even love him for it.

*

That's something Bart never thought to make him give her. She's sitting in the bathtub, upset over the new slash at the skin graft on her leg, _properly_ upset, and she suspects that if she was able to produce tears she'd be crying, right now. And Bart grabs him by the collar and demands he give her pain. She's had pleasure and the like, enjoyed it to a fault, but she didn't think perhaps she should know the feeling of pain.

So Ken programs her mainframe to register pain, and it hits her like a support beam to the head, messing with her speech programming, her memories, her vocabulary, her knowledge.

The only thing her mainframe tells her to do is scream.

She punches him in the face for the feeling, and when Ken tries to take it away, she grabs him by the arm and sobs to wait. Just wait.

Let her feel it, let her sob without a wetness to it about all the anguish she’s felt, let her feel all the wounds that were always superficial before this point.

Ken climbs into the bathtub with her and puts a hand on her knee, looking helpless. Like watching Bart suffer is changing something in him, making him more human the way the feeling is making her more human.

(Bart supposes the reason they never gave her pain and emotions and taste was to make her more efficient. Because if she had time to be human, she wouldn’t be the weapon they created her to be.)

*

Ken is sympathetic. He looks over coding on his stolen laptop, he types fast and makes her dizzy, and he tells her he can access her memory port.

Bart looks away from the TV and the mesmerizing advertisement proclaiming that everything is connected and stares. Ken presses the enter key and scrolls for a bit.

He looks stricken. He looks like he’s going to throw up.

It’s only after she takes the laptop from his hands that she understands what he’s horrified at.

Video memory. All labelled with numbers.

_Attempt No. 1. First Memory Wipe. Attempt No. 2. First Weapon Testing._

“Bart,” Ken whispers. “Maybe we should wait.”

She doesn’t listen. She presses on the first file, and watches through her own eyes as she sits up, and Colonel Riggins, much younger than she ever remembers him being, asking her what her name is. She turns to face a mirror and sees a girl who looks nothing like ehr staring back. The girl’s hair is longer and brown. Her eyes are the same, though.

Bart just keeps watching the footage, keeps watching, even whens he encounters things she remembers, long silences between her and Svlad. She watches herself discover the truth time and time again, watches herself reveal the wiring to the open air.

Each time they take her to the lab she first woke up in and they wipe her memory, and the cycle starts again. Different appearances, different bodies, different backstories. Always the same objective.

Bart finds near the end, when the world is dark outside, things she forgot. Svlad telling her that he was frightened, and how he was going to find a way out. Svlad telling her he was changing his name, because he couldn’t bare the memory that came with the name the scientists gave him. Telling her his name will be Dirk Gently.

Ken is appalled at the footage of the scientists testing her to see if they programmed her properly, testing to see if she’s as intelligent as they hoped, as indestructible.

“Please.” He whispers, on the third round of footage with the electric saw. Bart now remembers passing out like a real human during these tests, shutting down because she was frightened, like a real human. “Stop. I can’t watch them torture you.”

“They didn’ torture me.” Bart replies, and Ken hits the space bar and snaps the laptop closed.

“Yes they did, Bart.” Ken says. He looks sick to his stomach. “That was _torture_ , right there. They were trying to see if you’d crack under pressure.”

“But I didn’ hurt.” She protests, already feeling that awful feeling of sorrow rising in her, the sorrow she’d wished she had in the truck stop bathroom with the red thread and the needle. “They never hurt me.”

“Because they programmed you that way. They took away your fear. They took away your pain, so that you were more of a weapon.” He’s crying. She wishes she were crying. It’s all too horrible to comprehend. “Don’t you _see_ , Bart? They took away your _humanity_.”

*

Dirk Gently is the boy the called Svlad, the boy who they created to be a puzzle-solver. He would fit things together, put things in place, bring things and people to were they needed to be. And that’s why the deep hidden part of her mainframe tried to seek him out. Because she wanted to know where she fit.

They created her and tested and tortured her over and over. And each time she cracked and broke down, they wiped her memory and started over, trying to make her the perfect, indifferent, neutral, blank killing machine.

The problem was that when they first created her, she was too human. Working backwards was too hard for them. They forgot to extract the humanity she’d had the first time she woke up in that lab, left it, dormant, in the back of her memory port.

Ken wants her to be who she is, a mixture of the creators intentions and her own humanity.

Bart wishes she had blood and sweat and tears, because if she did, she’d treasure them.

*

Dirk barely remembers her when they meet up, again, in the basement of Patrick Spring’s mansion. There’s two arrows in his shoulder, and something black and oily leaking from the wound and from the corner of his mouth. Bart gets rid of the men who would hurt him further, while Ken fusses over the technology he was hired to create, and she stares down at Dirk.

She didn’t see him in the adult body they built for him, by the time she could’ve, the facility was burning.

He doesn’t seem to recognise her.

The mesh thing in place of her heart misses a beat. They were supposed to be a team. She’d keep him safe and he’d show her her place in the world.

She has no pity for him.

Bart leaves him, dying, on the floor.

*

Of course those evil creators come back for her, and of course when she fights back they take away the only thing that truly matters.

Not her humanity, not her pain, not her taste or her emotions.

They take Ken and they disappear.

*

Bart considers this in her cell at the police station, looking at Panto. He doesn’t care that she’s an android, built to destroy and be indestructible. He says she’s exquisite.

Maybe that’s why she gets them both out. He’s a different version of kind to what Ken was. Ken wanted her to understand what she was and be better than those who hurt her. Panto just wants her to be herself, without limits and barriers, doing what she wants, not what she was built for.

So, Bart leaves with him.

*

Ken wants her to come in.

Sweet, kind, _understanding_ Ken wants her to return to the place where they destroyed and tortured her.

She leaves him lying in the dust with the army they sent to come get her and Mr Priest, the man from her memories of the electric saw.

*

The thing about humans is that when they are utterly destroyed the way Bart knows she has been, they can’t be fixed up with better programming and new skin grafts. They don’t get back up. They’re just gone. No memory drive.

Panto and Silas and their people are dead. They’re gone. No happy ever after. She’s been worn down, she’s been beaten.

Bart does the only thing she can think to do.

*

“I’m so happy to see you.”

“Yeah, you too, Ken.”

Mr Priest grins at them, and they grin at each other, because he thinks he and Ken have her cornered, but what he doesn’t know is that he’s the one cornered, here.

(What he doesn’t know is that they’re going to raze this place to the ground, this time with him inside. What he doesn’t know is that this was always the plan, destroy from the inside. No more neutrality, no more indifference, no more blankness. Enough humanity that there is no pity, no mercy for the man who took pleasure at cutting her open with the electric saw.)

(No mercy for her creators who took pleasure in dissecting and destroying her.)

(Bart will take pleasure in _destroying_ them.)

 

**fin.**

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading to the end. If you liked this (or didn't, I'm not too fussed) please tell me more about in the comments, please, and feel free to leave me a kudos, because those are just as appreciated. Hmu on Tumblr @nose-coffee.
> 
> Again, thank you.


End file.
